Essays

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

“’What is a ghost but a person removed from corporeality?’ This is one among layers of questions Aditi Kini poses in Oriental Cyborg, a lyrical excavation into survival in the era of techno racial capitalism, and its “deleting touch” that so easily voids—reduces to faceless services—the exploited individuals performing various acts of techno-labor. A grieved searching drives this hybrid essay, which feels urgent and necessary as threats from AI grab headlines. This work compels us to see our culture’s love affair with technological progress as a means for continued colonization and domination. It also reminds us, and celebrates, that those erased don’t stay silent forever. We privileged may not be able to hear them yet, but those who are listening know. They roar.” — Allison Cobb

“In the mirror of Aditi Kini’s Oriental Cyborg, I become the monster—a hopeless automaton, an intelligence stripped of roar. With titanium-threaded theory, Kini radiantly stitches together the ideal Asian working machine. Get your own Oriental cyborg today: super dazzling and sexy, historically embroidered, an oracular truth who never tires, never complains, forever mute, what perfection!” — Lily Hoàng

Aditi Kini is an undisciplined writer. They’ve done both NYC and the MFA (at UC San Diego). They were a finalist/alternate for the 2020-22 Jerome Award for Literature. They edit Lumpenpockets, “a nonquarterly sick rag.” Read their words in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times, and elsewhere. They’re at work on multiple projects, all at once. They are blessed with two dogs, Lucy the Happy and Charly Kong, who make life worth living.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon is the first book in the Weaving Language series, which examines the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research as well as contemporary practices. Attempting to dismantle and rebuild commonplace understandings of the history of writing, Weaving Language focuses on fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record-keeping, storytelling, and poetry.

In Weaving Language I: Lexicon, weaving processes are mapped onto English grammar to suggest a method for reading woven works. Offering visual vocabularies as both discrete concrete poems as well as a collection of translatable terms, this book invites readers, writers, and weavers to participate by considering weaving as a system that can be decoded. Textile forms are broken into the basic building blocks of language, presented as a visual/textual lexicon.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon was initially self-published by Capone in 2012 and in 2015 re-issued in an edition of five as an artists’ book, which was awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize from Brown University.

Essay Press’s edition makes this important work available for the first time in a trade edition. The edition has also been newly edited and significantly expanded into a multivocal work that represents the contributions of a small collective of artists including Martha Tuttle, Allison Parrish, Sarah Zapata, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Amaranth Borsuk, and Imani Elizabeth Jackson, thanks to funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation. The book also includes an afterword by Kit Schluter and diagrams by Anni Albers (with permissions from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation).

Plans are underway to similarly expand and reissue the two additional books in the series both previously published in limited editions currently out of print: Weaving Language II: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth (information as material, York, UK, 2018) and Weaving Language III: Writing in Threads (Center of Craft, Asheville, NC, 2017). The Weaving Language project has been accompanied by numerous gallery shows, including “Material Memory,” a show running from October 7 through November 9, 2022, at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, to accompany the release of the Essay Press edition of Weaving Language I.

Artists’ books from the Weaving Language series are held by the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, NY; the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, RI; and at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL.

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.

The first anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry translated into English brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet's work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.

Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.

"Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life."— Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple

Kaur Alia Ahmed’s Cursive Paradise asks how a refusal of cogency can lyrically expand perception. They write, “To weigh heavily on something / is to decide its shape,” and throw language into a state of excess. These poems shift and eddy, loop, and undulate, seeking out spaces of desire and onomatopoeic attraction. All the while, Ahmed offers a view of subjectivity and gender made resonant and malleable, insisting on language that is lush with what cannot be contained by the voice or the page.

Cursive Paradise is the recipient of the 2021 Carolyn Bush Award.

Kaur Alia Ahmed is an artist and writer living in New York. He is interested in destabilizing language, handling it in similar ways to ink, skin, light. His work has been presented at Interstate Projects, 77 Mulberry, Alyssa Davis Gallery, island gallery, Entrance Gallery, and The Drawing Center. His poems can be found in the Poetry Project Newsletter, Baest Journal, Spoil Magazine, BOMB Magazine, and Rhizome. Cursive Paradise is his first book.

Cursive Paradise forces us to rethink feeling, to enter a world where purple is sharp and where nectar leaves us spellbound. Kaur’s writing shapes a space where form and function give up their historical antinomy and renders the world in layers—of light, fluid, fetish, and fissure—breaking the lyric down to its guttural release. 
— Bianca Rae Messinger 

Kaur Alia Ahmed offers gleaming edges around the most beautifully staged immediate action. I read certain parts over and over, becoming more conscious of the physical dependence our bodies form in relation to words and music. These lines leap at the least provocation. Ahmed infuses the overall arrangement (visual, orchestral, narrative) with as much yearning as the language itself, leaving us a perfect, wavering space to land. 
— Cedar Sigo 

This is indeed a cursive paradise, but you’ll find no italics here. Emphasis happens differently, through repetition (if you catch Stein’s drift). Kaur Alia Ahmed’s poems, odes to momentum and transformation, refuse to settle into a single form. They propel readers forward and reward their desire to linger on their electric, libidinally charged utterances by having them recur, rearranged and slightly altered, again and again.
— Mónica de la Torre

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other. In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. Her recent books are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Kelsey Street Press, 2018), SPIT TEMPLE: THE SELECTED PERFORMANCES OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Chanccani Quipu, a new artist book by Granary Books, and SABORAMI (ChainLinks, 2011). She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.

Jungle, (the latest 2025 self-published zine offering from studio saudari), delves into The Socio-Political, The Pitfalls of Neoliberalism, Circus State, Environmental Collapse, Heterotopias & Growth ~ Decay. 
Referencing Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1905), this print issue aims to combine various interpretations of The Jungle as a site of critique, of contention, of potential growth.

Contributors:
y3000w, Video Club, Fred Horton, Jordan Ossermann, Tristac Gac, Tom Hegen, Santiago Barragán, Anu Jakobson, Camille Theodet, George Nebieridze, Mu Pan, Robert Zhao Renhui, Thérèse Rafter, Cecilia Vicuña, Dani Santander Villarroel, Adam Call Roberts, Dr. Sönke Johnsen, Elena Zaghis, Miguel Garchitorena, Amanda Nell Eu, Mishka Mahomed, Dani Kyengo O'Neill / BŪJIN, Erin Jane Nelson, Mariana E. Rivas Salazar, Kim Rosario, Rachel Lamot, Marion Post Wolcott, Madina Mahomedova.

Designed by Felicia Usinto & Sera van de Water